Mellon Foundation President Earl Lewis Writes About the Absence of Federal Arts Funding
Since President Lyndon Johnson and a bipartisan Congress created the national arts and humanities endowments, no president has called for their elimination -- until now. We should pause and think about what our country would be like in their absence.
In 1965, Douglas Turner Ward, a Southern-born, Northern-educated playwright, produced a satirical story of a town that wakes up to learn its black residents have disappeared. In “Day of Absence,” the white townspeople -- played, in pre-“Hamilton” cleverness, by black actors -- come to terms with their segregated world. There are suddenly no blacks to labor or clean; no blacks to be hated and used to establish one’s importance...